Sunday, August 7, 2016

iPhone 6/6s has had the same "@2x Retina" screen quality that first came out in the iPhone 4 with 326 pixels per inch.

The 6 Plus and 6s Plus upped that with a "@3x Retina" screen with 401 pixels per inch.

Not sure if the bigger 7 Plus will go up to a 4x Retina and 535 pixels per inch, but I'm predicting the 7 will bump up its screen to a "@3x Retina" with 489 pixels per inch.* Better screen, faster, better camera are always good enough reasons for people to upgrade.

(And that's on top of what others have guessed with be a Higher Color Range screen.)

* Exactly how it does the 6 Plus screen does scaling is a little different, that's why its 3x and iPhone 6's potential 3x aren't the same.

Saturday, August 6, 2016

The watch really does notifications best. Those are a tiny amount of actual content with nice graphical wrappers and animations.

My wife and I often communicate in single letters and emoji. "U" "K" "👐"

I predict the Watch 2 will have a very custom Cell Phone chip to do notifications. Super low power, and optimized for receiving small amounts of data -- sent via either Apple's push notification service or text message and that's it. According to ancient FAQs, old school Pagers had very long battery life, measured in weeks or months on a AAA battery.

Hopefully Apple has the clout to either have it included in your cell phone plan, or baked into the cost of the watch so there's no monthly fee.

* Highly compressed voice for Siri is the biggest possible thing it might send. Looking a few minutes at the compression Siri uses, 10 seconds of audio could be about 5K to send, so very small too. Definitely something Apple could do.